Best Books for Writers

Building on her article published in Poets & Writers Magazine in 2018, “Practice Imagining Change: A Workshop Manifesto,” Rubinstein interrogates the notion of “good writing” in this collection of essays that mixes personal narrative with practical advice. By drawing on experiences in classrooms and coaching sessions as well as with publishers, Feels Like Trouble offers a vision of literary culture in which aesthetics and ethics are more thoughtfully intertwined. “‘Is it good?’ is a fixation that distracts us from what literature does and what it could do,” she writes in a note shared by the publisher. “I wrote Feels Like Trouble for anyone who has had this question...lodged in their mind, such that it resurfaces every time they pick up a book or a pen. In these essays, I hope to show how else we might read, write, teach writing, and talk about writing—how much becomes possible when we identify our own values and begin to approach writing as a gift for someone else.”  

“To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing,” writes Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative. “A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one.” In this seminal craft book on the art of writing nonfiction, Gornick makes visible and practical the task of casting one’s self into a personal narrative. Using experience from decades of teaching in MFA programs, the renowned critic and memoirist offers examples from the works of luminaries such as James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Marguerite Duras, and Edmund Gosse. Through intimate and lucid prose, this book provides guidance on how to identify truth in the words one reads and writes. 

With a literary career that spanned more than half a century, Ursula K. Le Guin continues to make an impact on readers and writers with her imaginative and challenging ideas. Her love for storytelling is captured in this rare collection of essays, talks, and performance pieces. Originally published in 2004, the book is divided into four sections: “Personal Matters,” “Readings,” “Discussions and Opinions,” and “On Writing.” Included are literary criticisms of classic books, advice on writing, and personal takes on gender, beauty, and aging. “All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them,” writes Le Guin. “We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.” 

“Do the things that do not compute. Be earnest. Be devoted. Be subversive of ease. Read aloud. Risk yourself,” writes Colum McCann at the start of Letters to a Young Writer, encouraging aspiring writers not only to learn the rules, but also to break them. Each short essay in this collection examines different aspects of both the craft and the profession of writing fiction, with titles such as “Don’t Write What You Know,” “Finding the Right Editor” and “To MFA or Not to MFA?” The book offers inspiration and concrete examples, welcoming writers to trust their own voice and most importantly, to write.  

What began as notes of encouragement to herself during a time of loss and upheaval, turned into inspirational daily posts shared on social media, which are collected in this book of essays and quotes by Maggie Smith. Each motivational quote ends with her mantra: Keep moving. Walking the reader through each step, Smith divides the book into three sections: “Revision,” “Resilience,” and “Transformation.” With a mix of life lessons and writing lessons, readers can feel less alone and hopeful to learn how to heal through writing, and receive practical tips on process. “I believe in the importance of revision, but here’s something I believe just as strongly: If you’re not careful, you can revise the life right out of a piece of writing,” writes Smith. “If you’re not careful, you can scrub all the weirdness and wildness right out of it.” 

In Unsayable: A Life in Writing, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Cunningham reflects on his life as a writer and on the craft of writing through intimate portraits and memories of his lifelong love of language. In vignettes with titles, such as “How to Write, How Not to Write,” “Is It Autobiographical?” and “Notes for a Story I Didn’t Write,” Cunningham offers his companionship on the journey of a writer’s life, from discovering the power of language to the mysteries of putting words down on paper. “Stories are, by definition, experiences about experiences,” he writes, “and we who write them know that any story, even the greatest of them, is an approximation of the unsayable—that which we all know but can’t express in language.” With insights on craft and storytelling, process, and exemplary passages from authors including Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, this book is full of inspiration. 

The subjects and ideas explored in this collection of essays by Nancy Willard span a wide range of the poet and novelist’s many passions: creative muses, fairy tales, litany as poetic form, and children’s literature. Readers and writers of all genres and levels of experience will enjoy Willard’s practical and entertaining insights and analyses, and find inspiration in her examination of the imaginative processes integral not only to literature, but to other creative disciplines such as art and film.  

This anthology celebrates the centennial of World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of contemporary international literature and culture. Edited by Daniel Simon, the journal’s editor in chief, the collection serves as an archive of work from Nobel laureates, dissident authors, renowned and emerging writers, such as Refaat Alareer, Marguerite Duras, Joy Harjo, Han Kang, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Octavio Paz, Elie Wiesel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Dubravka Ugrešić. The five sections feature impactful poetry, lectures, and essays that span across time and the globe, offering readers a vision of how literature can connect and act as a guiding light through times of crisis. “Publishing a magazine like World Literature Today takes the abstraction of a term like ‘world literature’ and materializes it in the work of the writers featured—and the readers envisioned—in its pages,” writes Simon in his introduction. “I hope the materiality of that work…will translate into an imaginative republic and ethical praxis that continue to inspire a global vision of literature.” 

The twenty-two essays in this collection edited by Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang tackle the questions of who can and should translate, and what it means to decolonize literary translation. From Anton Hur on “The Mythical English Reader” to Sawad Hussain’s “Why Don’t You Translate Pakistanian?” to Madhu Kaza’s “Not a Good Fit,” each essay is a personal and powerful take on what it means to engage with a translator’s identity and voice. In the foreward, author and translator Bruna Dantas Lobato writes that in reading this anthology, she is “standing in the company of many doubles, a chorus of translators writing down their truths, demanding systemic change” and that “there are as many ways to be a translator as there are to be human.” 

Gathering a “kit bag of rules for good writing” from his experience as a journalist, an executive in publicity and marketing, and as a spiritual coach and author, Neal Allen walks through his thirty-six rules to craft better sentences. Each rule includes examples followed by a pair of essays written by Allen and his wife, Anne Lamott, the author of several novels and nonfiction books, including the acclaimed guidebook Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Some rules are straightforward (Use strong verbs. Don’t show off. Remove the boring stuff), while others are more provocative (Smell the roses. Give your sentence a finale. Write the hard stuff). Each rule is meant to encourage and challenge writers, and be considered as suggestions for how and what to communicate in a sentence. “This book is curious about what happens after you’ve got a sentence in mind, maybe even after you’ve finished your entire first draft,” writes Allen in the introduction. “The book embraces persuasion in its biggest sense—not to win an argument, but to be elegant; to convince a reader to continue on to the next sentence.” 

Drawing from her decades of experience as the Washington Post’s chief dance critic and senior arts reporter, Sarah L. Kaufman guides readers through the effective use of verbs and how to write with grace and clarity. The first section of the book titled “The Practical” includes a short review of grammar and lessons on how to avoid adverbs and weed out boring verbs, while the second section,“The Poetic,” goes deeper into the usage of verbs and the science behind the power of verbs. Sprinkled throughout the lessons are a range of helpful examples from news articles, works of literature, science texts, advertisements, and more. Each chapter ends with tips and quick exercises from the lessons learned in that section to help sharpen and deepen one’s writing and understanding of the dynamism of words. “Verbs ignite emotions, transform our thoughts, and stimulate our bodies,” writes Kaufman. “Verbs cue movement images in our minds, and writers who use verbs well access the reader’s imagination directly.”